Comment by thefaux

> If you manage to get a couple of tenths of a percent performance increase in one of the big compilers during your career, you will have materially impacted global warming.

I've heard this kind of claim a number of times and I think it's more complicated than the crude statistical measurement makes it sound. Personally, I think that most programs are not run frequently enough to matter from an emissions perspective. For programs that are, like ML training programs, users will just train more data if the algorithms are faster so most energy efficiencies will get wiped out by the increased usage.

Even if that theory is wrong, what if there is a language that is 10% better than C for 95% of common C use cases? Wouldn't it be better for compiler engineers to focus on developing that language than micro-optimizing C?